


Let’s pretend that it’s summer

by pr_scatterbrain



Category: Bandom, Music RPF, My Chemical Romance, Panic At The Disco, The Sounds
Genre: Almost Famous au, Alternate Universe - 1970s, F/M, M/M, Multi, Recreational Drug Use, Whisky a Go Go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-25
Updated: 2012-07-25
Packaged: 2017-11-10 11:12:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/465611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr_scatterbrain/pseuds/pr_scatterbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Sound's music – Maja’s own music – has always saved her. Always. Except this time it doesn’t. </p><p>An early 70s groupie!Maja au where Gerard Way and My Chemical Romance save Maja. Featuring David Bowie, Frank Zappa, a Suzie Quatro fan named Joan, and Matt Cortez as an Eric Clappton fan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let’s pretend that it’s summer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [estei](https://archiveofourown.org/users/estei/gifts).



> N.B. This would not have been possible without the help and support of ruintooeasy. She generously gave her time, putting up with panic stricken emails, drafts riddled with errors, half started sentences, and unorganised ideas) and was honest with me from day one. Thank you. 
> 
> I would also like to thank my mixer and friend masterpenguin82. Thank you so much for making two wonderful mixes to accompany this. 
> 
> Finally I have to thank the mods at bandgirlsbang for their understanding and their assistance. *hugs and hearts*
> 
> Warnings: Potential readers should be aware that some of the musicians that feature in this bgbb fic have passed away. If their use in fiction offends you, please think carefully before choosing to read this. Additionally, there are also scenes containing drug use, misogyny, and homophobia.
> 
> Bonus material.  
> [Fanmix: Let’s pretend that it’s summer.](http://pr-scatterbrain.livejournal.com/188521.html)  
> [Bonus fanmix: Let’s pretend that it’s summer.](http://www.sendspace.com/file/oqubn6)
> 
>  
> 
> For estei who loves Debbie Harry, Suzi Quatro & Joan Jett. This one is for you.

 

 

 _“Anyone who understands how standing in a crowd of sweaty people, elbow to elbow, screaming along to the words embedded in your heart, can give you the most happiness ever needed. When you’re shoved against a sea of bodies and you don’t know what sweat actually belongs to you or your neighbour, you can barely breathe and in that moment, your favourite song starts playing and you forget about everything: all you’re concerned with is the melody, rhythm, and beat of the song. All you care about is singing your heart out and knowing it’s okay to love something maybe a little too much as long as it’s real to you.”_ \- Gerard Way.

 

 

 

As far as things go, Maja’s never really needed too much. A guitar and her boys and that’s about it, really. Except somehow it isn’t. Or it stops being enough. She doesn’t know where or when, but somewhere along the line it does and no matter how loudly she sings or how hard she plays, the music doesn’t quite manage to hold her together like it used to.

“It’s okay,” Félix tells her when they break up band practice early. “It happens to everyone,”

It doesn’t, though. Not to her. Their music – Maja’s own music – has always saved her. Always. Except this time it doesn’t.

But Gerard Way’s does.

 

 

It’s pure chance that she finds a shrink wrapped My Chemical Romance vinyl in the import section at her third favourite record shop. The album sleeve is dark and five shadowy figures dressed in crimson satin with their faces painted in black and white make up, stare beseechingly out at her.

“Oh,” Jesper says when he sees what she’s pulled out.

“You heard of them?”

Jesper smirks. “They’re Ziggy Stardust’s second favourite band. Everyone’s heard of them, doll.”

Maja curls her lip at him. Everyone, and their mothers. Of course. That’s so like Jesper.

He laughs at her and grabs it from her hands when she tries to put it back. “No. You have to listen to them.”

Jesper always says that though. That is why his apartment is filled with records half borrowed from friends and ex’s (all never to be returned) and half stolen from the brief, yet memorable, period when he was a DJ on Radiohuset. He loves music the same way arsonists can’t take their eyes off an open flame. Maja’s pretty sure she could have picked up a Doris Day record and he would have had the exact same reaction. Besides, either way it doesn’t matter. As always she’s stone cold broke.

He laughs when she tries to tell him that. Curling an arm around her waist, he takes the record from her and pulls her deeper into the aisle.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she hisses.

“What does it look like?” he hisses back as he tugs up the hem of her shirt and shoves the record under it.

Wriggling, she tries to stop him, but Jesper only grins at her. “Act natural.”

“Fuck–”

“Seriously, Maja, you need to own this record. It will change your life. I promise.”

As a general rule, Jesper’s promises don’t mean that much but the clerk is coming their way and it’s too late to stop now so when Jesper throws his arm back over her shoulder, she lets him and like teenagers they shuffle past the cash registers and then bolt once outside.

“Hey!” they hear the clerk call in their wake, but he’s too late by then.

Hand in hand they run an entire block; the corners of the stiff cardboard sleeve jabbing Maja the entire time. Too many cigarettes leave them panting messes when they stop, however even then Jesper is all smiles.

“You won’t regret this,” he tells her like he’d tell a girl he loved them.

She punches his arm. “I better not. It’s not like I can ever go back there again.”

Jesper rolls his eyes. “Like you’d ever want to.”

He’s probably right, but she doesn’t really want to agree with him so when he invites her back to his place, she blows him off and walks to Félix’s instead. He ruffles her hair when he sees what she brings with her.

“ _I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love,_ what have you been up to?”

“It’s Jesper’s fault.”

Félix nods. “Often is.”

Félix has always been Maja’s favourite.

His girl is out, but Fredrik is in, and the three of them end up camping out in their bedroom.

“Jasper says I had to listen to this,”

Fredrik laughs. “Youth.”

“He made me shoplift.”

“Oh my,” Félix mutters as he lets the needle drop. “What a youthful indiscretion.”

He says something else and it makes Fredrik smirk indulgently but truthfully she doesn’t hear much after that – Maja’s never been in love, but the music on the LP is something else. Somehow even just after the first few chords it becomes easier to breath, easier to think about picking herself up after the last song finishes and going home and getting dressed in her work clothes tomorrow morning.

“Who were they?” she turns and asks after the final song comes to a close, and her boys laugh at her.

“Some American band,” Fredrik says like that explains what she heard.

Some American band. Of course.

 

 

When Félix’s Girl Friday arrives with groceries and a bottle of cheap wine Maja stays for dinner.

“Gerard Way saved Maja’s eternal soul,” he explains when she asks what they got up to without her.

“Huh,” she replies. “I read in _The Sun_ that they were damning souls.”

“Either way, it’s good company to be in,” Fredrik says.

Maja can’t disagree.

At dinner she eats too much, but it and the wine keep her warm on the walk back to her place. Although she has work the next morning, she puts _Bullet_ ’s on again and pours herself another drink. Sleep can wait.

Sleep does wait.

She listens to the record three times over and when she eventually drifts off, she falls asleep to Gerard Way telling her he’s not okay.

She’s not okay either, but at work the next day she answers calls and files and gets ladders in her stockings when she catches the edge of her nail on them. The office manager makes a comment and during Maja’s lunch break she ends up having to buy a new pair. In the department store she stares at the packets and it’s an easy decision. It’s a pair of taupe coloured stockings. But she stares at the packets and somehow it takes Maja her entire lunch break to buy one of them.

On the walk back to work, she looks at the receipt and wonders if three krona’s is too much for a pair of stockings.

Outside the building a few of the boys from accounts corners her. In the lift ride back up to the office, they lean into her space. Their suits are cut finely and their hair is neat and she is used to it. She is. It’s just seventeen floors. At The Sounds last gig the club manager switched their time at the last minute. Instead of the ten pm slot, they ended up waiting around to play the four am. Seventeen floors is nothing. Seventeen floors is over within the blink of an eye.

An eight hour day ends too, it does.

She reminds herself of that when she is asked to take notes at an architectural consult. The client is from an old Scandinavian family. He cuts an imposing figure on the other side of the table and when he speaks, he is the sort of person that takes his time saying what he wants to say. Maja can appreciate that. Her short hand is good, but it isn’t great. Afterwards it takes her a good half an hour to work out exactly what she wrote in her notebook.

In the evening, Johan nods in understanding when she tells him about it. During the week he works part time in the mail room at a midlevel legal firm. For the most part she sits outside a junior partner’s office and makes excuses whenever his wife calls. Somehow Johan earns more than her. Over drinks with some people from his office, he tells her about this idea he has for a riff, this beautiful riff he thought up while sorting letters and helping himself to stationary.

Johan grins at her and on the walk back to her place he hums bars of it for her.

Maja doesn’t know what to say or how exactly she should react. It feels like there is a disconnect inside herself, deep, deep inside and in the realisation, she suddenly feels hollow. Drunk and stupid and full of echoes, she hiccups half a dozen times before Johan places his palm over her mouth and tells her to hold her breath.

“That will make them go away,” he whispers.

His hand smells like weed and when he removes it her lipstick is smeared everywhere.

Nothing goes away, she wants to tell him but by the time she opens her mouth to speak she is home and he is asleep on her couch.

He doesn’t stir when Gerard Way voice fills the room.

 

 

When My Chemical Romance announces their Scandinavian dates, she skips work to wait in line to get a ticket for their Swedish show.

“I told you it would fix you,” Jesper says when he finds out the reason their band practice is rescheduled.

“Don’t let her taste your Suzi Quatro collection,” Johan teases.

Perhaps it’s true, perhaps it’s nothing but on the night it doesn’t matter either way.

Maybe her own music isn’t holding her together anymore, but Gerard Way’s does. Somehow the notes and lyrics lace themselves through either side of the hairline cracks that run all through her and pull them back together and it’s maybe it’s little more than a quick fix but where Jesper steal his way through life, searching for thrills amidst the tedious mendacity of it all, Maja steels herself in Gerard Way’s songs and Ray Toro’s solo’s and for just a fraction of the day all the pieces inside herself somehow fit back together again and she is the person she remembers once being instead of the shadow of it.

From the side of the stage, sweaty and alive, Maja can hardly breathe. She’s been in this club a thousand times before; performed on the stage a dozen or so occasions when they’ve held open mic nights. But by her side a girl with her eyes painted black is crying and on the other side Félix is throwing his body around and Maja – all she can hear is the lead singer spitting words about hate and love and pain and vampires of all things and it is like he has speared an arrow right through her, right to the heart of her. Nothing and no one has ever done that to her.

Frightened and brave at the exact same time, she feels, is, so alive. Her heart is racing and her bones are rattling with the weight of it all and, and, and she is full of so many things. It feels like she is overflowing with it all, and suddenly, she is on the verge of weeping too.

“I’m not sad,” she tries to explain when she catches Félix watching her.

“No,” he agrees. “I don’t think it’s that.”

On their way out, he buys one of their shirts from the merch table with a sweaty five dollar note.

“To keep that smile on your face,” he tells her.

Félix always understood her, even when they were children he did and a little less than a month later when she asks, Félix takes over the lease on her apartment and helps her sell her car to her neighbor Saul, who buys from her it outright. A friend of a friend ends up taking her TV and VCR off her hands and to round it out, Félix lends her five hundred dollars.

“No,” she tells him.

He shakes his head. “You’ll need it.”

“That’s yours. I can’t take it.”

“You can,” he says, and, “Take care,” and they both know she can’t promise anything but she does anyway.

Eight hours later she’s in Berlin, pressed up against the barrier watching My Chemical Romance opening for David Bowie and can’t imagine being anywhere else.

 

 

MCR does two other German dates. She buys scalped tickets and goes to both. At Hamburg she meets some kids that offer to let her tag along with them to MCR’s next gig in the Netherlands. They’re okay as far as kids go. They’re sharing an old van and when it’s her turn to drive they pile into the back and let her play whatever tapes she wants while they try to sleep on the foam mattresses stapled to the floor. She ends up going to Belgium with them too, but by Paris she has worked out who MCR’s tour manager is, and most of their tech crew.

By Paris she’s worked out how to get backstage too, though in all honesty she knew how to do that before then. There is nothing particularly complicated about flirting or bull shitting and she’s reasonable at both. She alternates between the two with dopey bouncers and tour managers, pretends not to notice the tech crew looking at her legs and winks at Iggy Pop when he comes to visit Bowie in London – it’s really more of the same.

By then she’s worked out pretty much everything.

Everything aside from My Chemical Romance.

“You haven’t met them yet?” Frank Zappa’s babysitter, Miss Pamela, asks.

Maja shakes her head.

Pamela furrows her brows. “But you’re here for them.”

“Yeah,” and Maja is.

She’s there _because_ of them.

“I could–”

“It’s okay,” Maja says.

She doesn’t know if it’s shyness (something that sounds foreign to her) or what. But she’s okay watching from backstage. If she’s honest, she was okay watching from the crowd.

“Liar,” Pamela says and of course she’s right.

If Maja was really okay with watching from the crowd she’d still be in the crowd. But instead she’s backstage, only an arm’s reach away from MCR’s dressing room, drinking with their techs, sleeping only a few hundred meters away from their bus, and currently standing on the other side of the room from Ray and Bob.

“Yeah. Don’t tell.”

Pamela makes a face. It’s a good one. The night before last, Frank Zappa told Maja that Pamela wants to be an actress. He said she had real talent, so much so he’d cast her in this film he was making.

“What other kind could she have?” Maja had asked at the time.

Frank didn’t answer.

And standing before her now, Pamela doesn’t either. Instead she tells Maja all about this reoccurring day dream she used to have when she was younger where she and Paul McCartney went steady. (Maja has no idea what that means).

“So I understand what you’re doing,” Pamela says when she finishes. “But it’s stupid.”

It really is.

A few hours later Pamela can’t stand it any longer. She and Keith Moon take matters into their own hands, hooking their arms through Maja’s and sitting her down opposite Matt Cortez in the catering tent.

“Baby steps,” Keith tells her.

In acid washed jeans and a signed Yardbirds’s t-shirt, Matt is clearly confused, but he smiles when Pamela introduces Maja and doesn’t blow her off when Pamela and Keith leave them to ‘get to know each other better.’

Over over-cooked steaks and watered down beer, he tells her he likes her accent. She likes his shirt and when she traces the faded Eric Clappton’s signature above his heart, his skin feels hot through the thin cotton. The loops of his signatures blur under her fingertips and though his breath feels like it becomes short, he holds her gaze as steady as if it wasn’t.

“You can have it, if you want,” he offers and she nods.

He has kind eyes, she thinks.

He takes her random greenroom and with their backs turned, they swap.

“Thank you,” she says, after, and he shakes his head.

When he reaches for her, her shirt – her old one – pulls up to expose a silver of skin. She doesn’t know what she expects, but when he touches the scrawl of an ‘E’ on the shoulder, she inhales sharply and as she does he pulls back.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she tells him and it is.

But he shakes his head. “No, it isn’t.”

Maja doesn’t understand.

She looks at him but she does not understand.

Backstage Pamela tells Maja that MCR doesn’t do groupies.

“It’s a rule,” she says.

Maja doesn’t understand. A rule?

Pamela shrugs. She says none of the other girls know either. Not even Alicia who knows everything there is to know about MCR.

For a while last spring she and Mikey were together, but lately she’s been with David Bowie’s publicist Cherry Vanilla more than Mikey. And although Alicia’s on tour working as a tech for David rather than MCR, she still knows all the MCR in-’s and out-’s. But as a general rule, techs do know everything about everyone.

“We go everywhere and hear everything,” Alicia shrugs.

Maja’s been following MCR for a while now. She knows that’s not necessarily true. But Alicia and Pamela turn out to be people good to know on the touring circuit. It’s through them Maja meets most of the other acts currently on the festival circuit, including Gabe and William, who mispronounce her name.

“Major,” they call her and suddenly that’s her new name. Major, the Swedish groupie.

Gabe says she should print it on a shirt. Gabe says a lot of shit though. But the name catches on and it is the one people call out when they see her dancing backstage, the one her rooms are booked under and eventually the one Gabe and William use when they lace their fingers through hers and introduce her to Mikey Way.

“I knew him way back,” Gabe says, but he always seems to say that about everyone he knows. “He used to come to all of my gigs, drink all the booze at the after party and then disappear with someone other than me.”

“I thought that was me who did that?” William asks.

“You both did,” Gabe says, smiling faintly in a manor that suggests he is back there instead of right there with then now. Maybe in his mind, he is.

It’s hard to know with Gabe.

Where William does anything anyone hands to him, Gabe introduced William and most of his band to drugs. Hell, he is responsible for more than half the tour having the good stuff on their buses.

Mikey squints at Maja.

“I recognize you,” he says finally.

“You should,” William says. “She’s been following you guys since Barcelona.”

They haven’t been to Barcelona yet, like that matters. A month into it, she is used to the rhythm of it all. Of them; of musicians who know the road but not geography beyond festival grounds or the layout of a venue. Of never standing still, but somehow always being in the right place at the right time. It comes easy to her. Easy as breathing. If she wants to know something she goes to one of the girls, or one of the tour managers. They know dates and times. Or truths instead of rumors. But she hasn’t needed either since Stockholm.

(Keith says she’s free.

Maja just thinks she has other priorities.)

In comparison to Gabe and William, Mikey is profoundly awkward. His glasses slide down his nose and one of his knees bows out oddly.

“I broke my ankle last year,” he explains to her.

“Did it hurt?” William asks.

Mikey ignores him and takes his shoe and sock off to show Maja the scar. “They had to pin it back together.”

She wants to touch and see if she can feel them under his skin. “Can I?”

He looks at her, confused.

She tries again. Her English is a patchwork of formal school lessons and things she picked up along the way. Sometimes what she says isn’t what she means.

Halfway through her second attempt, Gabe shakes his head. “Put that thing away.”

And suddenly everything is a joke. She laughs because she knows this one (dick jokes and ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ – everyone knows those things).

In the afternoon when she makes her way to the side of the stage Mikey nods to her. Simple as that, she is in and when MCR pack up, their opening act has a space set aside for her in their bus.

“We always had space for you,” Gabe confides to her. “But it’s officially yours now.”

“Officially official,” William hums when he comes to say goodbye. “That comes straight from the horse’s mouth.”

“The horse being Gerard in this scenario.”

“Gerard, as in Gerard Way.”

“Gerard Way as in My Chemical Romance,”

“My Chemical Romance as in–”

They go on like that until Sisky comes and collects William. TAI… are off elsewhere. Maja doesn’t know where and she doesn’t ask.

“We’ll see each other again,” William reassures her before he leaves.

“Is that a promise?”

“No, a prediction,” William says. “I read it from some tea leaves.”

Perhaps he did. She’s heard stranger things and when his bus pulls out of the lot, she waves and blows him kisses because there are worse things to believe in than a singer who just dropped acid.

 

 

One seat on a bus becomes two, two become three, three becomes Gerard sitting down next to her in the middle of the night and asking her to tell his fortune.

“Bill said you told him all the secrets of the universe.”

William is the most wonderful liar.

Gerard’s dark eyes are very wide. Taking his hand in hers, she touches the lines on his palm and hums. He could be a child really, with eyes like that. He could be anything really. Or anyone. But somehow he is the person who she is misspending her youth on.

“What do you see?” he whispers.

“What should I look for?” she asks. “What do you want me to find?”

His fingers curl; she lets them, loosening her grip.

“Once, when I was very young I saw this telemovie,” he tells her, ethereal and desperate. “I can’t remember what it was about but I remember my Grandmother covering my eyes because there was something that frightened me.”

She looks at him.

Two nights ago they played for an audience of thousands. They had cheered and cheered and known every single world and sung them loud and true. Gerard had been electric, and she had been so breathless watching him that Matt had to hold her hand to stop her from trying to get closer to him and the music he was making.

Now her eyes are bloodshot and her fingertips smell like Frankie’s pot and Gerard wants to hear secrets.

He has her heart and now he wants secrets.

If she were William, she’d give him lies. Hell, if she was Jesper, she’s grab his hand and run until they couldn’t hear anything above the pounding of their pulses and couldn’t see anything but the edge of the horizon.

She touches the webbing between his fingers instead. “In this world of ours there is always something frightening around the corner.”

And there is.

Gerard takes her words, folds them up in the creases of his palm, and nods. “Yes. There always is.”

As he does, she finds herself leaning close, desperate to know; “Are you frightened?”

He presses his temple to hers. “Yes.”

The answer is like a kiss and she closes her eyes.

 

 

The road stretches out before her – before them all. From where she’s sitting on the bus, it seems infinite.

“It’s just a trick of light,” Gabe confides in her.

“Light and sound and radio waves,” Mikey nods in agreement.

Maja twists her neck and looks at them. From the back row of bunks, they smile matching Cheshire cat smiles at her.

Gathering up her long skirt in her hands, she crawls over to them. Barefoot, with flowers and feathers woven into her hair, she feels wide and uncontainable and when Gabe places his hands either side of her hips, she smiles at him because the world has spread itself out before them and in doing so, made them so tiny.

 

 

Gerard’s lyrics are like a home away from home. Once when he is very high and Mikey has blacked out, Gerard pulls out a dog-eared notebook and lets her peer into his head, and into his heart.

“But that is my head, and my heart,” she realizes as she mouths the new songs. “Where did you get these?”

Gerard’s eyes are very bright and behind them Frank and Gabe are trying to open the hotel window. They start to shout. Frank pushes Gabe. Gabe pushes back. Bob swears at them; says _‘For Goddness sake,’_ like Maja’s grandmother and Matt laughs so loud he rolls off the bed.

Maja presses her fingers down over the words, over herself like Eve would, like Eve did when she covered herself in shame. “How did you get these?”

“I dreamt them,” Gerard answers. “They came to me in a nightmare.”

He moves her hand and points at a figure, a wild woman in a gasmask and tattered Victorian grown.

“Mother War whispered them into my ear.”

“Mother War, told you about me?”

Gerard’s hand touches her arm. “No.”

 

 

The word _‘groupie’_ gets thrown about far too often. _‘Muse’_ too.

Maja doesn’t know which one bothers her the most.

 

 

Midtown open for MCR half a dozen more times before they break off to do a festival in Helsinki.

“Bigger stage, better rider,” Gabe says, but the corner of his mouth is tight and everyone knows that isn’t it.

The tension in his band is palpable.

In the morning before they are due to leave, the two of them walk past the convoy of buses and trailers of equipment and down to the fence line of the new empty fair grounds. Last night it had been filled with people and energy, now in the brisk air it feels like a different place. In week old bell bottoms that are sliding down his hips with every step he takes, and with his chest bare under his (stolen) shearling leather jacket, Gabe holds her close as they walk. In the distance techs are breaking down equipment, their voice ring loud and clear. In six hours they’ll be setting it all up again somewhere else. In six hours everyone will be somewhere else. She tucks her fingers through Gabe’s belt loops and exhales slowly.

“Keep on truckin’ pretty girl,” he says before they leave, pressing a kiss to her temple.

“You too.”

She doesn’t see him again until they touch down stateside just before June. Midtown are over by then. Gone with a whimper not a bang. He and a guy he introduces as Nate turn up at MCR’s Tampa gig. Acid washed Jeans torn (and barely held together with safely pins) and sunburnt skin peeling, they are thick as thieves when they corner her in the after party.

“You were holding out on us,” Gabe accuses her.

She was doing no such thing.

“No,” he shakes his head. “Not like that. This.”

‘This’ is a bootlegged import of The Sounds.

She didn’t even know they sold those outside of their merch stand at their local gigs.

Fingering the cardboard, she looks at the image of her and her boys. They recorded the EP the winter before last in one of Radiohuset’s unused studios in the middle of the night while Jesper was supposed to be hosting the three am slot. It was one of the reasons he ended up losing his DJ position.

“I feel like I don’t know you,” Gabe complains which is so strange to hear, so very strange when he just handed her the best parts of herself.

Pulling out a marker Gabe grins and after making her sign the album sleeve he drags her around the room. Frank gasps in excitement when Gabe shows him the seven inch and so does Gerard. With Gabe’s fingers twisted through hers, she feels awkward and terribly exposed. It is only after he has grown tired of showing her off, Gabe takes her back to the place he’s staying at and makes Nate begs her on his behalf for stories about her ex girlfriends.

When Gabe tries he’s very good at getting what he wants. But even if he wasn’t, Nate begs prettily enough for her to indulge them with a few of her best stories, the good ones she’s saved up for a rainy day. They make Nate blush (which Maja knows was Gabe’s point) and Gabe laughs with his mouth full of the eggplant and pasta Nate made them. Later when Gabe invites her back into his bedroom he lets her watch when he unbuttons his jeans and slips his hand into his boxers.

Some things are so very predictable.

She can’t even bring herself to be upset when she misses the call time the next morning.

Luckily LA is the next stop on MCR’s tour and that’s right where The Academy Is… are also heading. While in Tampa Gabe calls William on her behalf and he happily allows her to hitch a ride on his bus with TAI…, This Is Ivy League and half of The Eagles. She hasn’t gotten a chance to hear any of their music but Butcher tells her it’s good. He tells her it’s so good that The Eagles are going to be their openers for the entire North American leg of TAI…’s first headlining tour. Maja likes Butcher; likes the trees and clouds that cover his skin and the kaleidoscope of colours they are painted in. She thinks out of all of them, he understands what it’s like to reach for something and find it not there; she thinks that’s why he has everything he cares about tattooed right where he can see it.

She doesn’t know what he thinks of her.

She really doesn’t know what anyone in TAI think of her.

William though, is glad to have her back. In the darkness of the bus they sing snatches of other people’s songs and she doesn’t mind when he tucks his head under her chin and curls his body around hers and touches her through her clothes like she supposes he would touch someone he wanted rather than someone that is merely there.

Back in Europe, back when Pamela told Maja that William was someone she ought to know, Maja had let him and Gabe kiss in front of her, let them have their audience to perform to, let them pretend they were doing something shocking and that she was shocked by it. Now she wonders if she made a mistake indulging them. Too many things are a performance with William and when TAI’s bus catches up with MCR’s, she kisses William goodbye. The unshakable familiarity of it makes her feel so sad for him.

“You could stay,” he tells her.

But she can’t. He should know that better than anyone.

“You could come with me,” she offers.

“You know I can’t.”

He could. But he doesn’t.

They both know where the other stands.

 

 

In LA she meets a rebellious teenager in a hotel lobby. The girl’s name is Joan and it’s way past her bedtime.

“I heard Suzi Quatro is staying here,” she says, all black hair and fearless eyes.

Maja nods. She heard that too.

“Are you waiting for her too?”

Shaking her head, Maja pulls out the ticket stub Gabe had scrawled the Chateau Marmont’s address on. “My Chemical Romance.”

The teenager makes a face. “Them?”

“Yeah.”

The girl rolls her eyes, but Maja thinks she would. The next day while waiting outside a radio station while Gee and Frankie are being interviewed, Maja sees her sitting at a bus stop smoking hand rolled cigarettes.

“Hey,” Joan calls out. “Swedish girl. Yes, you. Come over here.”

Apparently Joan saw Suzi when she checked out.

“Did you talk to her?” Maja asked, trying to figure out what Joan is trying to impress her with.

Joan laughs on smoke until she chokes. “Did I talk to her?”

Maja doesn’t know what she said. It doesn’t really matter though. In the evening Joan takes her to Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco and some girl named Stable Starr calls Maja old.

Maja is old compared to all the teenagers racing around in their nylons and painted faces.

In the bathroom, she splashes water on her face and the next morning she sneaks back into the hotel. When Brian sees her waiting in the hotel lobby, he doesn’t say a word.

“Did you miss us?” Frank asks, throwing himself at her, all arms and legs and black eyes.

“Of course,” Maja answers and she did, so much.

America is strange. Or maybe American musicians are. Being Swedish is exotic. Lou Reed fetishizes her but Frank tells her he’s joking.

Almost everything’s a joke for Frank. Frankie. Together they drink whiskey straight from the bottle and run half naked through the long hotel halls and steal all Ray’s socks and wake up Twiggy and it’s so stupid and so fun and Maja laughs so hard when Ray chases them that she can’t breathe. He catches her like that, and puts her into a headlock and musses her hair.

Brian pulls her aside the next morning.

“You know the line Maja,” he says over a continental breakfast.

And for a few moments she is confused – it’s only later she figures it out.

With a pitiful sense of anger she wants to go over to Brian and set him right. To rewind time to that very moment when he was loading his plate with toast and she was sleepy and slow and tell him it’s not about sex. She’s there for the music. She’s there because MCR saves lives and eighteen months ago Gerard Way saved hers.

However, even if it was about sex, she hates their no groupie rule. Or rather she hates the impertinence of it. Her choices are her own. Just as MCR can make their own decisions, so can she. She’s never seen anything wrong with sex. She doesn’t see anything wrong with having sex with people who make music she likes (or make music she doesn’t like, or don’t make music, or whatever).

But that isn’t the point.

 

 

She lasts three weeks before she splits.

The music just isn’t the same.

 

 

In NCY, a guy who does the lights for Deep Purple introduces her to Ian Gillan in CBGB’s and a few hours later she joins then when they head out on their North American tour. The music isn’t the same. She isn’t the same either. But they like her stories and her legs and sometimes when they get really high, they lay their heads in her lap and she tells them about how she stole Bullets from a record store and cut up her knee this one time she blew William in a coatroom while his manager and the record executives talked about sales and his two page interview in Cream.

They love that story and each time she tells it they kiss the scars better; their breath hot against her skin, and eyes dark.

She isn’t the youngest girl they have on tour with them or the prettiest, but when she combs her fingers though their hair it soothes them to sleep. Their music soothes her too. It doesn’t translate the parts of her she no longer is able to articulate or get them to make sense, but it curls itself around her and when Ian and John Paul Jones jam in her room she doesn’t feel so alone.

It doesn’t hurt when she leaves them for Lou Reed.

He doesn’t remember her until someone calls her Major, but by then she’s back stateside. Once there she finds herself being found by Frank Zappa of all people in a huge overgrown compound that he apparently owns.

“You again,” he says when he sees her sitting with Tom Waits.

“Me again,” she nods.

He breaks into a smile.

“I’m making that film,” he tells her, picking right up on their last conversation as if no time had passed at all.

She thinks she gets his sense of humour a little better now, but it’s still surreal when he takes her inside to hang with the cast. One of them is Ringo Star and for some strange reason he knows who she is.

“Frank’s told me all about you,” he says.

Maja has no idea what he could have said and she doesn’t stay long enough to find out.

 

 

It’s always summer somewhere. If she keeps moving, the season doesn’t.

 

 

She eventually runs out of money in LA, which she thinks is an awful place to run out of money. (The irony alone almost kills her).

“The sticks would be worse. Or, Maryland,” Joan says in yet another hotel lobby, this time at the Riot House, but Joan is a teenager who still lives with her parents so what would she know.

She actually invites Maja to crash at her place, but the thought of sleeping on Joan’s place and being made breakfast by Joan’s mom is too fucked up for Maja to even begin to consider.

“Don’t say I didn’t offer,” Joan says when Maja turns her down.

Maja nods. She knows better than that.

In the end she crashes with this guy she meets outside a club. Joan tells Maja his name is Spencer. Joan also tells Maja some other things about him. Knowing Joan, they’re probably true, but it doesn’t really matter all that much when he lets her sleep on his fold out couch.

“I don’t have a spare room,” Spencer says, not like an apology just like it’s a fact that should be obvious.

She doesn’t care. He doesn’t either when she doesn’t leave.

“Do you want me to pay rent?” she asks over breakfast a week or three later.

He eyes her in that way of his that Joan didn’t describe.

They both know she doesn’t have any money (or a visa). He doesn’t have much either. He works part time as an orderly at the local hospital. Sometimes he comes home with black eyes and dark bruises but the one time she asks about it he shakes his head and tells her he got them at a punk gig which Maja thinks is a lie because Spencer doesn’t go to gigs. She doesn’t even think he listens to music that was made in the last decade.

In his room there are piles of vinyl records but they aren’t his.

Every third or forth day he receives a letter from the owner, Ryan. They smell like patchouli and the postmark says they come from Canada.

“He thought he was going to get drafted,” Spencer explains.

“Did he?”

“Fuck no. He’s born on the 30th of August.”

She smiles. “You were born in September.”

He smiles back at her, blinding and beautiful, and maybe most of what she says now is bullshit but it’s worth it for a smile like that. “I am. And you’re born in October.”

“We should throw a joint birthday party, then.”

“Yeah, totally.”

Spencer’s deadpan is really something, Maja thinks.

He’s really something. Full stop.

Though one of his friends, Maja starts bartending at a place on the stripe that smells like stale cigarette smoke, and where the movie star Ashlee Simpson still sometimes comes out to dance on Saturday nights. She’s nice, Ashlee Simpson. In long flowing Halston dresses and shoes that lace up around her calves, Maja thinks it should be surprising for someone like her to be at a place like Angels & Kings, but maybe it isn’t.

“That’s because Pete Wentz owns it,” Spencer explains, which doesn’t really explain anything.

Angels & Kings is kind of tacky and everyone says it’s lame compared to Whisky a Go Go but at least the people that come to it are mostly over twenty-one. She sees Mikey Way there once. He isn’t any different from the last time she saw him. When he sees her looking at him, he nods like they know each other.

 

 

She hears from one of the bartenders that he and his band are in LA writing their next album.

But bartenders hear all kinds of things.

She doesn’t believe any of it until Mikey turns up on her doorstep sallow and shaky, his lips a tight narrow line cut into his face.

“I couldn’t stay there,” he tells her but that is all he tells her.

When Spencer gets home he flicks his eyes over Mikey, cool and utterly apathetic to the sight of Mikey staring blankly at the TV set.

“He needs somewhere to stay,” she explains in the kitchen, keeping her voice low so Mikey won’t overhear.

Spencer snorts. “And you gave him my couch.”

She looks over her shoulder – Mikey is finally asleep. There is something so acutely vulnerable about the way his body is arranged. Motionless, his limbs appear too long for his body. They fold in on themselves, but even then there is not enough space to accommodate his body. His legs hang over the end of the couch.

“It’s just for one night,” Maja tells Spencer. “We can’t kick him out.”

Spencer rolls his eyes but he gives in, Maja can see it in the slump of his shoulders.

“One night,” he makes her promise.

“One night.”

 

 

It’s not going to be one night, they both know that, but if Spencer wants Maja to promise it, she will.

 

 

The next morning Brian calls.

“Mikey’s in your living room,” he says.

It isn’t her living room, but she doesn’t think Brian wants to hear that. She thinks about telling him Mikey’s okay, but that isn’t right either.

Her silence must say something because Brian sighs. “Don’t let him go anywhere. I’m coming over.”

Mikey isn’t going anywhere. He hasn’t moved an inch in the last four hours. Sitting in a patch of sunlight just outside Spencer’s room, he dozes on and off.

The sun makes his skin appear see-though.

“That isn’t good,” she tells Spencer.

Spencer snorts. “No shit.”

That’s pretty much all Spencer says on the subject. He isn’t one for pep talks. She gets the feeling somewhere along the line he might have been, before Ryan and life in general burnt him out, but she hasn’t seen any evidence of it. When all is said and done, she knows that Spencer’s one of the good ones, but his interpersonal skills are limited if non-existent. It doesn’t help that he’s been working double shifts all week.

When he goes to get the paper he steps over Mikey’s legs as if they weren’t there. As his shadow grazes over Mikey, Mikey jerks awake. Unsympathetically Spencer ignores him and steps right back over him with the paper in hand.

Maja watches him flip through it, finding the sections he wants and blithely disgrading the others. When he glances up, he gives her a look.

“You can’t do the crossword,” Spencer tells her. “That’s goes for you too Mikey.”

Mikey blinks, his eyes focusing slowly on Spencer. “But they’re the best part.”

“I know.”

It’s such a Spencer thing to say. While he flips through the International News section, Mikey begins to inch closer to him. By the time Spencer has actually made it to the crossword section, Mikey is sitting next to him.

Reaching out, he points to fourteen down. “Pleochroic fits there.”

Spencer eyes him.

“Ten letters; Showing different colours when viewed from different directions,” Mikey tapes the spot. “Pleochroic.”

“Did I ask for your help?”

Mikey looks at him blankly. “Did you know the answer?”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Spencer retorts, folding the paper in half.

Mikey shrugs. “No, it doesn’t.”

“That’s what I thought,” Spencer nods.

Fourteen down is pleochroic. But Spencer fills it in last. It makes the corner of Mikey’s mouth twitch. Maja is watching. She sees it. She thinks Spencer does too, but he doesn’t react.

Once Spencer must have been very different.

When he heads back into the hospital at lunchtime, Maja touches the unopened envelope sitting on the kitchen counter.

Ryan writes letters to that Spencer, the one that existed before the Spencer Maja knows.

If Maja was someone else, she thinks she would open the letters and see what he was like. But she isn’t that person; she’s the type of person that makes tea for Brian and Gerard when they turn up just after one o’clock in the afternoon, and pretends not to overhear them try to talk sense into Mikey. Fussing with milk and sugar, she hears too much and can’t help but wish Spencer had called in sick so she wouldn’t be alone when Brian corners her while she’s waiting for the water to boil.

“So, Mikey says he’s staying.”

Maja nods. She figured that would be the short-term plan. She doesn’t know what Brian and Gerard’s long-term plan for Mikey could possibly be. It doesn’t seem to matter when Brian rubs his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Fuck,” he swears. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Bri–”

Brian shakes his head and visibly pulls himself back together. “Okay, this is how this is going to go. Mikey said he’s staying, so we’re going to leave Mikey here and you’re not going to fuck him up anymore than he’s already fucked himself up.”

He pauses, but she does not speak. He might want promises, but she knows it isn’t the time for such things.

“When he’s ready he’s going to come back,” Brian tells her, but it sounds like he’s telling himself.

 

 

Gerard’s eyes are red rimmed when they leave. Mikey’s too.

When they hug goodbye, they cling to each other like they are being torn apart.

(Maja looks away).

 

 

When Spencer gets off the night shift at around four in the morning, he heads out with some people Maja doesn’t know. He comes home at about seven in the morning with dirt under his nails and purple circles under his eyes. He gets into bed fully dressed and sleeps until six in the evening. When he emerges from his room at about nine, Maja is heading out to work.

Sleep rumpled, he tugs on the bottom of her dress.

It’s brown and purple patchwork suede with a long fringe hem. Gabe bought it for her in New Mexico. Midtown played one of their last shows there. The sound was horrible though and one of the speakers shorted out halfway through their set. The crowd really didn’t care though. One mid level act at a festival was much like any other.

“I can see your underwear.”

“That’s the point,” she tells him to make him laugh.

In the corner of her eye, she catches Mikey watching them, but only for a moment. He seems to drift in and out. She heard from Alicia who heard from Vanilla who heard from David that Gerard’s off the hard stuff and has been since their Asia tour imploded. Back when Gerard wanted his palm read and would have believed anything she told him, Mikey would have (and did) follow him anywhere. She isn’t sure he is capable of that now.

Gerard and the guys are still at the Paramour Mansion writing their third album.

In the following days they drop by one by one; annoying Spencer and upsetting his routine of general indifference. Gerard looks so much older now. They all do. While he and Ray sit with Mikey, Maja and Frank smoke outside on the fire escape. His arms are covered with more ink than when she last saw him. It runs from his neck to his fingers. It colours him and spells him out and Maja closes her eyes.

“We can’t lose him,” Frank whispers.

“Give him time,” she tells him.

Frank ducks his head and nods.

For a very long time he is quiet and so is she. Her cigarette has almost burnt down to the filter when Frank snorts. "Life never turns out like you expects, does it?”

Maja shakes her head. “No.”

With hands that don’t shake, she tugs him down and lets him rest his head on her lap. Smoothing out his tangled hair she takes his half smoked cigarette and inhales deeply. If she had any stories left to tell, she’d tell him one now. But she doesn’t have any left to tell. All the good ones have been told and all the bad, boring, or mundane ones aren’t worth repeating.

Leaning down, she presses a kiss to his temple and hopes that will be enough.

 

 

Mikey stays with them for about a month before he is able to contemplate returning to the Paramour to record his parts. When he does go, he only manages to last for short bursts and when he returns back to them he is sullen and quiet.

This goes on for weeks.

 

 

Occasionally when Maja and Spencer both aren’t working and Mikey is up to it, they bum around LA together.

For someone who doesn’t go anywhere or talk to anyone, Spencer knows the town inside out. Occasionally he lets them tag along with he goes out to bars and run down theatres and suburban house parties that spill out into other peoples front lawns. Most of the time, he disappears by himself.

Once, Mikey and Maja are out by themselves and they happen to catch him in the midst of a group of people. Seeing him like that – rolling his eyes at something a dark haired woman said – feels oddly wrong, as if they have overstepped some invisible boundary.

When she turns to Mikey to comment, she finds him staring at Spencer.

“It’s like that line in that film,” Mikey says hours later to Brian when he stops by with coffee and label updates.

Brian exchanges a confused look with Maja.

“Yes,” Maja nods. “Exactly like that line in that film.”

Wisely, Brian doesn’t ask either of them to explain.

By the afternoon Spencer is back and in the hours before he is due to head off to work, he and Mikey play games of scrabble. Mikey loses more than he wins. He’d win more, but Spencer plays strictly according to the rules and guidelines.

“A game needs integrity,” he tells Mikey whenever Mikey makes up words.

“The English language is constantly evolving,” Maja reminds them, because she can.

Spencer eyes her. “Not in my living room.”

Mikey pushes his glasses back up his nose.

Spencer turns to him.

Mikey looks back at him blankly.

 

 

The thing she keeps coming back to is if it would have mattered; if her being in The Sounds made a difference, if they would have respected her more with a homemade record under her belt instead of one of their’s hidden under her jacket.

But maybe that’s not the point either.

 

 

MCR finish their third album just before summer begins.

“Gee’s thinking about calling it the _Black Parade_ ,” Mikey tells them over dinner.

Spencer barely manages not to roll his eyes. Maja sees it. So does Mikey if the slight smile on his face is any indication. The three of them all know Spencer doesn’t mean anything by it though. It’s just his way and when MCR books their first performance ( _‘ Secret. It’s a secret performance,’_ Gerard emphasises), Maja cancels her shift and Spencer calls in sick.

Their new music is rich and operatic. It tells a story of a patient and is all about life and death. Although Maja recognises Mother War, it doesn’t hurt like it did once.

Afterwards, after the show and after the after party where everyone is hugging and slapping each other on the back and after everyone had gone home, the three of them go and eat breakfast at an all night diner. Away from the stage lights and the bus with his band’s name on it Mikey doesn’t really look any different from Spencer. Changed out of the gold and silver trimmed brigadier uniform Gerard designed for the band, Mikey could be anyone. Any kid. Any guy. He does look at Spencer though; thoughtful and quiet as if he is still trying to work something out. Maybe Mikey’s always been trying to work Spencer out. Always and forever, right from the moment they first meet.

Spencer doesn’t look back.

But Spencer doesn’t look at anyone.

Maja never really understood love and she’s never met anyone else who does. But she looks at Spencer and she can’t help but think of the cruelty of loyalty. The trait is breed so deeply in Spencer, so true and so whole.

Maja doesn’t know Ryan.

He is just a photograph in Spencer’s wallet and the author of letters Spencer keeps folded away in the top draw of his dresser to her. It feels wrong to suppose or imagine who he could be. She only knows Spencer and, to an extent, Mikey.

She knows that Spencer’s in love with Ryan, but Mikey just wants to spend time with him.

It took Maja a while to notice, but the longer Mikey and Spencer spent around each other, the easier it became to understand them. Neither of them say all that much but sometimes when they do, the corner of Mikey’s mouth will twitch and once Spencer laughs at something Mikey says.

Maybe it isn’t something that anyone will write an album about, but it feels real to Maja. It feels realer than almost anything else.

 

 

She’s just gotten out of her shift at A&K’s when she heads her name being called. Turning, she sees Joan waving at her.

“Hey, Swedish girl,” she says. “I have the best news!”

Maja can’t help it. “Does Suzi know your name?”

Joan makes a face. “No.”

“Did she give you another autograph for your collection?”

Joan makes a face. “You’re not close at all.”

“What then?”

“I’ve joined a band!”

“A band?”

“Yeah,” Joan laughs. “I met this guy last night and he wants to start this band and it’s going to be amazing, M, I can feel it already.”

Her eyes are bright and Maja doesn’t think she’s ever seen anyone happier, not ever.

Maja remembers that. She remembers Felix and Johan and Fredrik and how it all clicked when they found Jesper, drunk and full of ego, wandering around the festival grounds. Joan laughs and talks about the other girls playing drums and guitar and how it’s all just beginning and Maja finds herself nodding, because for Joan, it is.

When she gets back to the apartment Spencer snorts when she tells him.

“Yeah, I know. She snuck into the hospital this morning and told me.”

Maja gets the feeling that wasn’t the only thing Joan did or said to Spencer, but then again Maja has never quite been able to figure out how Joan and Spencer know each other, or rather, how they know each other so very well.

“Joan told me she’s going to write a song about you,” Maja tells him, just because she can.

Barefoot, Spencer leans against the counter and eyes her. “Bullshit.”

“Nope. That’s what she said.”

“She didn’t tell me that.”

Maja laughs a little. “I don’t suppose she would.”

Mikey would, if he wrote a song about Spencer. But he doesn’t write songs. Ray and Gerard do. Mikey calls Spencer though. He’s been gone a month and a half but he checks every now and then, calling from hotel rooms and payphones outside venues. Sometimes Maja sits just outside the kitchen alcove and listens to the faint whispers of Mikey’s voice and to Spencer give one sentence answers. It never sounds like much, but then again they’re not the sort of people who ever need say much.

Gabe calls once; apparently he’d written a song too.

“It’s in the air, my love,” he tells her. “Can’t you feel it?”

And maybe she can.

“It’s a really great song. I wrote it after I got back from the Arizona deserts,” he tells her. “I want you to sing it with me and Bill and Travie. I have it all worked out.”

He doesn’t, though.

While bussing tables, she over hears Glenn Frey mention something vague to Butch Walker and John Bonham about TAI… and a possible hiatus. She thinks he’s vague for a reason, but that’s not always a bad thing. On her walk home from work she thinks of William too, who sings and lies and pretends and is her friend. So much time has passed since they kissed each other goodbye.

Spencer isn’t home when she gets back, but that isn’t out of the ordinary. They’ve been living together for almost a year and she still doesn’t know what he does the majority of the time. (Once she thought she saw him and Joan with a tiny dark haired guy and platinum blonde girl, but she wasn’t sure it was him or someone else). Unbuckling her mustard coloured platforms, she goes into the kitchen and pours herself a glass of water. Her hair is damp with perspiration and her tangerine palazzo pants feel heavy on her.

It’s almost Summer.

She can feel it in the air.

 

 

  
There is no particular day or moment where it happens, and maybe that’s why she is so startled when Spencer asks if she still needs her key.   
  
“The landlord charges fifteen dollars if one goes missing. You should leave your copy if you’re not coming back.”  
  
“I’m coming back,” she tells him.   
  
But she doesn’t.   
  
With her savings she takes the bus to NCY and swaps Matt’s autographed Clapton shirt for tickets.   
  
Standing up by the stage with the metal bar pressed against her stomach she closes her eyes and listens to the music. Lets it wash over her and vibrate her bones back into shape, and when they play their last encore she is crying. She doesn’t know why, but she is.   
  
“Hey,” Worm says when he sees her, touching her arm. “M, you good there?”  
  
“Yeah,” she says, and she is.   
  
  
  
  
  
Once, Gerard Way saved her.   
  
Once his voice and his words held her together and help her up.   
  
But that was just how the story began. She knows this know.   
  
She knows so much now. So little too. That isn’t a bad thing though.   
  
  
  
  
  
On her way out she runs into Matt. Or rather, he finds her.   
  
“Worm told me you were here,” he says.   
  
Her eyes are dry now, but she supposes they are still red rimmed because, protectively, he steps closer to her.   
  
“I’m okay,” she tells him before he can say anything.   
  
He doesn’t look convinced. “Do the guys know you’re here?”  
  
She shakes her head. “I traded your shirt for tickets. The one you gave me with Eric Clapton’s signature on it.”   
  
“Oh.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” she says, but she isn’t. Not really. Because giving it away gave her this.   
  
“Did it go to a good home?” he asks.   
  
She nods. “Huge fan.”   
  
“Not as big as you though.”   
  
She shrugs. That’s under review.   
  
Around them the venue is emptying. She thinks about going backstage one last time. She could. Her name probably isn’t on any list, but almost everyone knows her. But she doesn’t move and neither does Matt.   
  
She remembers when they first met, how she knew then that he had kind eyes and she thinks that makes perfect sense because Matt is kind. She’s seen him look after Mikey and watch over Frank – he’s watched over her too.   
  
“I still have it you know,” he says. “Your t-shirt.”   
  
There is a moment –   
  
“You do?”   
  
He catches her glaze and nods, a smile quirking the corners of his mouth. “Yeah.”   
  
  
   
  
  
Spencer’s never really expected much from people. Maja knows this. But she thinks it’s okay to ask for help – she thinks sometimes people need to, she thinks it’s alright, and so when she puts the key he gave her to his apartment in an envelope she writes Mikey’s name on it instead of Spencer’s address.   
  
“I’ll make sure he gets it,” Matt promises.   
  
And Maja knows he will. (She knows Matt.  
  
Matt doesn’t ask anything of her.   
  
He could. But he doesn’t. This, she is certain she will remember).   
  
From the airport she calls Félix.  
  
“You sound funny,” he says when he realises it’s her and she laughs because she probably does.   
  
“I’ll be home tomorrow,” she tells him.   
  
“What time?” he replies. “I’ll pick you up.”   
  
And it isn’t an ending or a beginning but she as she boards she hums an old tune to herself.   
  
“What’s that?” the air hostess asks. “It’s catchy.”  
  
Maja smiles. “Thank you. I wrote it.”  
  
“Oh,” the air hostess says. “You’re a musician.”  
  
Maja – she can’t help but laugh. “Among other things.”

 

 

 


End file.
